Today’s Irish Times carries a commentary by Joe Humphreys titled, ‘Africa Should not be Defined by Single Events.’ Citing the recent example of the successful World Cup in South Africa, Humphreys notes how media coverage changed dramatically from hysterical predictions that tourists would be murdered, to nearly universally positive, even fawning coverage of the tournament and the country.
Humphreys asserts that our images of Africa are familiar and therefore even comfortable – either despairing to the extent that we feel helpless to see or effect any change; or positive in a caricatured sort of way, i.e. ‘Africans are always happy.’
Continue reading ‘South Africa & the World Cup: Challenging Stereotypes?’
Margaret Poloma and Ralph Hood’s recent book, Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church (NY University Press, 2008), left me feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Poloma and Hood offer a sociological account of a church that has ‘failed.’
By ‘failed’ I mean that Poloma and Hood’s research coincided with a time when the Atlanta-based congregation they were studying abandoned its downtown premises. The homeless they were trying to attract were seemingly forgotten about.
Continue reading ‘Poloma and Hood Book Review: Blood and Fire – Is this the Emerging Church?’
If you yearn for economic justice and human flourishing in the southern hemisphere, you may be plagued by the nagging suspicion that there is little that you can do to promote this. Sure, you can give to charity or even go on a short term volunteering mission, but still there’s a sense that these efforts are at best band-aid ‘solutions,’ or at worst, volun-‘tour’-ism for rich Westerners to salve their consciences.
Dr Aidan Donaldson confronts some of those doubts in his new book, Encountering God in the Margins: Reflections of a Justice Volunteer (Veritas, 2010). Donaldson is Assistant Head of Religious Education and Chaplain at St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Belfast. He writes out of his experience of the Christian Brothers’ Developing World Immersion Programme and its work on Project Zambia.
Continue reading ‘Aidan Donaldson Book Review: Encountering God in the Margins’
The Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, is marking the midpoint of its three-year research project this week with a conference, ‘From World Mission to Interreligious Witness: Visioning Ecumenics in the 21st Century.’
The conference is recognising the centenary of the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference, which is considered the birth of the modern ecumenical movement. Prof. Linda Hogan, Head of the Irish School of Ecumenics, opened the conference on Wednesday by acknowledging that ecumenical heritage. But she noted that the concept of ‘mission’ articulated at Edinburgh has become problematic in our pluralising, globalising world.
Continue reading ‘Questioning World Mission: Trinity College Conference on Ecumenics in the 21st Century’
Last week as the conference, ‘Re-emergence: Christianity and the Event of God,’ was coming to a close, we were shaken out of our conversations as the fire alarms in the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin at Belfast, reverberated throughout the building.
It wasn’t a fire. The alarms had been set off by the dismantling of a Light Installation by Beyond Church from Brighton. The installation had involved the use of a smoke machine, which our alarms took every bit as seriously as real smoke.
Continue reading ‘Re-Emergence in Belfast: De-Institutionalising Christianity’
What can Christians in the West learn from the Masowe Apostles? Much can be gleaned from a remarkably insightful book, Dr Matthew Engelke’s A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (University of California Press, 2007).
Not long ago on this blog, I reviewed Dr Isabel Mukonyora’s book about the Masowe Apostles, an African Christian movement with its origins in Zimbabwe. That post has prompted some discussion on this blog about varieties of practice within the movement, and how the Masowe Apostles fit into the wider Christian story.
Continue reading ‘Matthew Engelke Book Review: A Problem of Presence – Beyond Scripture in an African Church. What Do the Masowe Apostles and Post-Modern Christians have in Common?’
There is more to the Catholic Church than sex abuse scandals.
Although that is a rather obvious point, in contemporary Ireland, it’s a fact that could quite easily get overlooked. Of course Catholics and other concerned citizens are right to criticise the Catholic Church and its failings in the Irish context. But a recent book edited by Prof. Linda Hogan, Applied Ethics in a World Church: the Padua Conference (Orbis, 2008), is a timely reminder not only of the global scope of Catholicism, but also of a spirit of critical enquiry that is informing new ethical developments among Catholic theologians.
Prof. Hogan is Head of the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin. Her edited volume is based on a conference that drew more than 400 Catholic moral theologians to Padua, Italy in 2006, to participate in what she calls ‘the first international, cross-cultural conversation on theological ethics’ (p.1). The book, which has won the prestigious Catholic Book Award from the Catholic Press Association of the USA and Canada, features 30 chapters by a genuinely international panel of scholars.
Continue reading ‘Linda Hogan Book Review: Applied Ethics in a World Church’
Last month Bishop Paul Verryn was suspended from the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. Bishop Verryn was a prominent anti-apartheid campaigner and has in recent years become well-known for opening the doors of the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg to Zimbabwean refugees.
About 2,000 displaced Zimbabweans sleep in the church every night. Everyone seems to agree that this stretches the capacities of the church and its resources to a breaking point. South African authorities have claimed that the church has become a health and sanitation hazard, and there are rumours that some children have been sexually abused in the church.
Continue reading ‘The Suspension of Bishop Paul Verryn & the Zimbabwean Refugees: Problems with being a Prophet?’
I’m intrigued by the astronomical growth of Christianity in the majority world, and I think it’s important that Christians in the West ask themselves what the churches in all the far-flung corners of the globe can teach us. That’s a part of what motivates my research on charismatic Christianity in Zimbabwe.
During my fieldwork in Zimbabwe in 2007, I couldn’t help but notice the Masowe Apostles. They are distinctive for dressing in white robes and meeting for hours in the open air. It is hard to miss them.
Continue reading ‘What can the Churches Learn from Zimbabwe’s Masowe Apostles?: Isabel Mukonyora Book Review, Wandering a Gendered Wilderness’
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